As you might know by now, HBO decided to send Game of Thrones fans on a scavenger hunt around the world in the weeks leading up to the premiere of the eighth and final season of the show — a hunt that involves finding any of six Iron Thrones the network scattered around the globe.
It must surely speak to the intense nature of GoT fandom, or maybe just an acute, finely honed sense of geography, that it only took a little more than a week to find five of the six thrones. None of which were hidden in the US, with the thrones instead squirreled away in far-flung locales from Canada to to Sweden.
Settings where thrones have been found so far include Brazil, a forest in the UK, coastal Spain, Sweden and Canada.
https://twitter.com/ceri_walters/status/1109457160415690757
According to a local news site in Vancouver, a couple recently found the Canadian throne there hidden in a small mountain town. Birgit Sharman and her husband Kevin tracked it down to Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, a town with a population of a little less than 2,000 people.
HBO is taking the promotion pretty seriously, it seems. Two men wearing fur coats, presumably of the Stark clan, were waiting on the throne to be found and put a crown on Birgit’s head that she was allowed to keep and which she showed off via her Facebook page.
“I still can’t believe this has happened! Right here in Tumbler Ridge!” she wrote on her page. “To see the throne and have your picture taken in it, drive south of Tumbler Ridge on Hwy 52 for 20 km, which is 1 km past the turnoff to the Peace River Coal Mine on the Core Lodge Rd. There’s a pullout on the right side. The throne is there, beside Babcock Creek.”
As of the time of this writing, HBO has not yet released images or a livestream from the location of the final of the six hidden thrones. No doubt fans will find it quickly, like the previous five, buoyed by excitement from the fact that the final season is just weeks away.
To that end, that’s why HBO apparently decided to take a novel approach to marketing the season, choosing to promote it via some creative strategies like the throne scavenger hunt. HBO also teamed up with the American Red Cross to host a blood drive, encouraging fans to “bleed for the throne” in advance of the Season 8 premiere, which is set for Sunday, April 14.
